Tag Archives: business use of social media

IIA Toolshed #5

Influencer Tools

Tooler’s Choice? Buzzsumo is an online tool that tracks content on all social networking sites and ranks them based on the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. It allows you to find out what content is popular by topic or on any website. You can input search criteria and find out what content is already working in your area so you can identify some quick wins for social content production. Buzzsumo allows you to set up keyword alerts, so you are updated when content is posted or updated. Knowing what content is working on social for your competitors or other publishers in your industry is very helpful. Buzzsumo is a great way to find top content around specific keywords, phrases or topics which is a very useful tool when turning a content plan or strategy into a content calendar of topics. Be careful when using Buzzsumo that you don’t fall into the comfort zone of writing about what is already doing well instead of finding new topics that haven’t been written about yet but combined with other tools Buzzsumo is an excellent tool in the social or content marketers toolkit. You can also track social influencers by keyword and sector. Overall it is very powerful for social content but the free version is limited.

General Information

Product

Topsy

Klear

Buzzumo

Followerwonk

twazzup

Klout

Website

http://topsy.com/

http://klear.com/

http://buzzsumo.com/

https://followerwonk.com/

http://twazzup.com/

https://klout.com/

What Is It

Social search and analytics tool. A search engine for Twitter. It keeps an index of tweets dating back to 2006. Purchased by Apple in 2013, the toolshed found the tool to be largely undeveloped since then not offering much additional value than Twitter search. Very limited analytics in the free version.

Website with real time search of twitter for influencers within Twitter. Search by company name, keyword or #hashtag.

Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which is a numerical value between 1 and 100

What's It Like To Use?

At time of assessment, we found the tool to be slow and buggy.

Easy on the eye. you can search for influencers in certain segments (eg food or music) and by country (ie. Ireland), it gives you lists (which include some randomers) and then it's quite manual to add these influencers to your lists.

Free version very limited. 14 day free trial of Pro is good. Fairly user friendly. Good webinars to get started. No need to enter credit card details to trial 🙂

Easy (ish) to use and find Twitter Bios. However in order to get best results, you must have a handle on basic Boolean Logic. Eg. (Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare, Cork, Mayo). Easy to filter results by number of followers and/or Social Authority. It is also very easy to benchmark your Twitter handle with other Twitter accounts.

Each to use. Authenticate via your twitter account and go search. Throws up the top 25 influencers who you can sort by different options. The influencer is defined by the the number of followers which can have distortions (2x number of followers doesn't mean 2x influence) but its not bad.

Very easy to use - sign in with multiple social accounts. Great UI, good dashboard that shows all your accounts, gives you a feed that you can use to create (and schedule) engaging posts. You can set what topic you want to be known for, and it gives you your score based on that. The mobile app can be a bit buggy and it works better on Chrome rather than IE browser.

Is There Anything I Should Know?

It's easy to use but functionality is limited. It was bought by Apple a few years ago and it feels as if not much development has been put into the tool since then.

it's very expensive for what it is! And we don't trust the results!

Finds content that is most shared across Social, Find influencers by topic, you can set up key alerts by keywords, brands etc & you can track competitors.

Followerwork has some nice functions if you have a paid Moz Account ($99 per month). Functions include being able to Analyze and track Twitter accounts. However my favourite paid feature is the ability to export your Twitter bio search results into a CSV/Excel file. A brilliant option for Twitter advertising campaigns. Finally if this interests you, but you don't have $99 a month.....Grab the FREE 30 day trial and start seraching and exporting Twitter lists.

Not bad (and its free). Used it to on a number of different categories then used it to search the #fennelly hashtag from 1st September and gave me a reasonably good list of results. Its not been updated in a while and not clear who runs it or who pays for it. Algorithim works purely by number of followers.

Score is based upon a algorithm that crunches variables like your follower size and relevance but is heavily influnced by engagement RT and @ replies. The score is more a measure of impact and possibly influence. The Chrome plugin for Klout is very handy. Hootsuite users can also search by Klout score so big credit to Hootsuite for incorporating this functionality.

Who would you recommend it for?

Useful for searching a URL and seeing who has mentioned it on Twitter even if they didn't mention you. Useful for analysis competitors and generic terms.

Brand managers with lots of budget and time on their hands!

Anyone trying to effectively listen to the market, keep track of competitors, and get key insights into who to follow

Anyone trying to build up a targeted following on Twitter. Anyone looking to find potential influencers in their industry. A company that is looking to build targeted twitter list and advertising campaigns.

Its free so its something that you can use with ease. If you know something quite well you may not get much out of it e.g. the #digitaltransformation tag gave me mostly a list of people I have on a list which means its accurate and adds a little but too much. But its free so no harm to try and see if it adds value.

Anyone looking to have a presence on social for a particular reason; its good to help you maintain a focus, but is limited as Klout will fall down if you are someone who publishes multiple types of content e.g. a news agency. Not for multiple users. Very useful for bench marking against other influncers or competitors and setting targets. Handy for quick checking of influencer before outreach.

Cost

FREE. There is a pro version. $12k pa per user

$99 up to $600 per month

Free, Pro, Agency& Enterprise price plans are available. $99 per month for Pro, $299 per month for agency. Enterprise pricing is available upon request. Going from free to $99 per month seems a bit of a leap and the trial period is short at only 14 days.

Great functionality with the FREE version. $99 if you want to export results and benefit from additional features.

Free

Free

General Criteria (Out Of 4)

Ease Of Use

3

2

3

3

4

3

Price

3

1

2

4

4

4

Documentation

0

3

3

3

1

3

Mobile compatible?

4

2

3

2

3

3

Tablet compatible?

3

3

3

3

3

0

Specific Criteria (Out of 4)

Search by topic

4

1

3

3* (only searches Twitter Bios)

3

3

Competitive Evaluation

2

3

3

2

1

2

Trends over Time

2

0

0

0

0

2

Regional/Geographical Search

0

1

3

4

0

2

Influencer Search Ability

0

3

3

3

3

4

Saved Search Ability

0

4

3

0

0

0

Total Score

21

23

29

24

22

26

What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Marketing Automation

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

IIA Toolshed #4

Social Media Design Tools

Tooler’s Choice?

We looked at four social media Design Tools, no one is the winner because they are all very different and serve different needs.

General Information

What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.

It is an online image creation and editing tool. Has been hailed as "The easiest to use design program in the world”
– The Webby

Web based infographic software. Works best at creating visuals using your data sets. Not recommended for creating a simple visual.

It is an online infographic maker

A very powerful image creation and editing tool for markers who are not Graphic Designers. Great for editing images, creating logos and even infographics.

Its an online GIF making site, where you can very quickly make a give from images, videos or even youtube videos

draw.io (formerly Diagramly) is free online diagram software that can be used as a flowchart maker, network diagram software but also a handy editing and design tool.

What's It Like To Use?

Very quick and easy. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals.It can be used for both web and print media design and graphics.

Very quick to get started, easy drag and drop feature allows you to build presentation or infographic quickly. Good selection of templates.

It is a simple platform to use for creating infographics. It has a number sample templates to get inspiration from. However, the majority of templates are only available for paid subscribers. Easy drag and drop interface allows rapid infographic building with elements such as charts, maps, pictograms, icons, text, images and more.

It can be a little intimidating and even fiddly to use initially. There are so many features and options that you can use. However once you get the hang of PicMonkey you can edit and design images in minutes.

It's very easy to use, very straightforward UI, but its sole use is for making GIF's.

The user interface initially appears intimidating as there is a lot of functionality and each session begins with a blank canvas. There is no registration and you literally start to design from scratch but the process is fairly intuitive. You can import images, add text with lots of export options and formats.

Is There Anything I Should Know?

Social-media and technology expert Guy Kawasaki joined the company as chief evangelist in April 2014. When you pay for an image, you only have rights for 24 hours. Good news - you only pay for what you use. Bad news - users might get an unpleasant surprise if they need to re-purchase an image. This is not made super clear in the interface.

It takes quite a while (marginal few extra seconds) to save, even when you haven't edited anything : (

In order to unlock all the features you'll need to subscribe for a premium version ($15/month). With the Premium version you are able to export the infographics into PDF and PNG formats. The product was created by Eugene Woo who is also the founder of vizualize.me which is an infographic maker for resumes.

PicMonkey has a free version, but images fonts and functionality are limited. I would strongly recommend upgrading to the paid version (known as Royale Membership). It is inexpensive - $33 a year, billed annually or $4.99 a month. The paid version gives an unbelievable number of image overlays and design templates. One downside of PicMonkey is it does not allow you to re-edit images or even save a "work in progress" for a later date. One big downfall with PicMonkey is that it is desktop only. A Mobile App would be really useful.

There is no need to sign in/register to make a GIF, but having a profile gives you more flexibility (there is a limit to the lenght of the gif you can make without signing in). Also before signing in, Youtube gifs seem to not work properly. Registration is free, and very quick and easy. Once you are registered you can remove the watermark. They have an chrome extension which seems to work pretty well and is easy to use. Its also possible to share to your social profiles (in many different ways) from within the app. Note there is a limit to the video upload size ( MB). There is virtually no editing of videos - it is just a GIF maker.

This tools is really designed for rapid building of flow charts but could also be used for enhancing, editing and producing good graphics for social media output. There are limited stock graphics available in the search bar - mainly icon style but currently it is a free tool with future licensing planned.

Who would you recommend it for?

Creating images for use on social networks, in presentations or for print.

Any small business currently outsourcing design work.

For businesses wishing to create quality infographics without the cost of in-house designers

Any business that wants to create great looking images for their marketing materials and social media posts without the cost of a graphic designer.

Creating GIFs quickly from photos, videos, webcam or youtube. Especially useful for companies with lots of related images and willing to experiment in visual story telling.

Creating images and assets with flow chart elements or basic editing of images

Cost

Free unless you purchase images. It would be preferable if you could arrange to view images by Free/Paid. Payment mechanism is cr card only (no PayPal). You have rights for 24 hours to edit imagery. £1 or €1 only.

There is a Free option, but it is limited. I would strongly recommend upgrading to the paid version (known as Royale Membership). It is inexpensive - $33 a year, billed annually or $4.99 a month. The paid version gives an unbelievabile number of image overlays and design templates.

Free

Free but with future licensing planned.

Specific Criteria (Out of 4)

Size formats for various social platforms

4 -Yes, it has pre-set up templates for Twitter header, FB cover, and all the main social channel image post sizes.

3 - Yes you can change the canvas size.

3 - the canvas size is customisable

4 - There are plenty of size templates and you can customise your image or design to any size.

1 - no not really, its an embedded link when sharing on Facebook/Twitter, but this is probably the right way for it to be shared

Size is pretty much determined by the edited size of the canvas.

Purchase images

4 - Yes, it has a range of free and priced images that you can search for from within the tool. You only pay when you publish the image - before publish you can use but they are watermarked.You can also upload your own images from your computer or Facebookor drag them from your desktop.

0 - You cannot purchse images although there is an extensive libriary

3 - free and for purchase images available. You can also upload own images

2 - Once you have the paid version there are amazing templates, images and designs you can use. However you will most likely need to bring your own images to the PicMonkey table.

0 - not relevant to this platform

0. Some free icon style images available in search bar.

Add transparencies

4 - yes you can edit the transparency of layers.

0 - no

0 - no

4 - Yes it is really easy to isolate images and add transparency of layers.

0 - no editing capability

0 - you can move images to background but no transparency

Add layers

Yes, and you can easily move them back and forth - easier to use layers in this than it is in photoshop.

2 - You can basic layers

1 - you can add layers

4 - Yes - very easy to layer images, text and photos.

0 - no editing capability

3 - Yes. Simple basic layering

Editing capability

4

4

3 - Fine

3 - Once you create an image on PicMonkey you cannot re-edit it. However there is great editing features available when editing a picture.

0 - no editing capability

3 - Fine

Add text & edit fonts

4 - yes and good range of fonts

4 - some really good fonts

3 - fine, but could be more variety

4 - loads of fonts and you can even import and use additional fonts on your pc.

0 - no editing capability

3 - Simply start typing. Can change text fonts etc

Save templates

3 - Yes although they are not called templates, you can save designs and copy designs to use them as templates for future designs.

3

4 - Yes

0 - Once you have created an image on PicMonkey you need to save it to your pc. They do not store your images, (This may be a good thing)

0 - no editing capability

3 - Yes

Good range of export formats

3 - presentation formats don't export to ppt compatible

3 - limited to pdf formats and image formats. Will not export to ppt

2 - pdf and png 4 - Dermot - export to Google Docs etc

3 - Good format options.

2 - GIF and MP4. Its more impressive that you can create a give in a few ways

4 - wide range of drop down menu options of fromats and saving options from Google Drive, Dropbox to Browser.

What did you love?

4 -ease of use and the pre defined templates for social and ads.

3 - SurveyMonkey Integration was great and really easy and quick to use and get started.

3 - easy and quick to build infographics

4 - Once I got used to it. It made me feel like a Photshop wizard without even going near the complexities of Photoshop.

It does what it says on the tin, no unnecessary frills

Although built for flowcharts it offers lots of functionality for creative use. Easy to play around with.

What did you hate?

3 - Very little. Can't believe there is no mobile option. Not even mobile optimised site.

3 - Felt a bit like WordArt at times, limited shapes. Slight time delay can be annoying.

1 - no keyboard shortcuts copy/paste like ctrl+c or ctrl+v, instead of clicking on delete button you need to use venngage interface button to delete items.

3 - Only complaint is the inability to save and re-edit images. And the lack of a mobile app.

Inability to do ANY editing (even to flip the images around, which would be handy for videos taken on a phone). To get around this, upload the video to Youtube first.

Initial blank canvas and early learning curve.

Are you going to continue using it?

3 - Yes

3 - Yes, good for reporting

3 - Yes

3 - Yes

4 - Yes

What’s next from the IIA Toolshed? Customer Service Tools

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

IIA Toolshed #2

Social Media Publishing Tools

Check out the detailed review below including Buffer, SproutSocial, and SocialOomph.

General Information

What is IIA Toolshed? IIA Toolshed is a group of digital marketers & digital experts who know how difficult it is to keep up with the ever changing array of tools at our fingertips, to supposedly make doing business easier! To make things simpler, we’ve come together to test, evaluate and share the reviews of a broad selection of tools & technologies, to ultimately make the decision easier for you, when choosing what tools might best suit your business needs. At the IIA Toolshed, we come together every 6 weeks to evaluate a set of tools for a particular business objective, and we’ll publish our findings right here.

A Social Media scheduling and reporting platform.
You can schedule and manage content from your Facebook (Personal and Business), Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Wordpress accounts. It also has 100s of additional apps that gives your monitoring and commenting abilities on other sites including Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.

Social media productivity tool which allows you to
publish and monitor social media activity

Sprout Social is an online social media management, reporting and engagement tool that enables publishing (incorporating analytics's) to various social media platforms.

What’s It Like To Use?

Pretty easy and seamless. No real learning. Support was a bit generic. Dashboard intuitive - easy to remove accounts. When you move stuff around or change times, it caused a few problems.

Easy to set up and use. Just go to hootsuite.com and sign up. Easy to add Social Media accounts and search for add on apps. Its dashboard is easy to navigate, search social networks and see previous scheduled posts. Hootsuite has a mobile app that allows you to manage your activity on the go. However - would recommend that you do the bulk of your Hootsuite scheduling and reporting from the Desktop dashboard.

When it comes to giving access to another user, they must create a social oomph account, it's time consuming. The interface appears to be very poor but it does have some good functionality. Cons: It is not intuitive and learning to use it takes some time. The design is hard to navigate.
Pros: It has feature called Queue Reservoir which helps to drip feed updates to selected social profiles. The Posting section does have a number of features such as creating and managing updates, creating updates from RSS feeds, and creating updates via email. The Following section facilitates follow-back and auto-welcome on Twitter as well as finding new people to follow function. The Monitoring section allows to set up regular email alerts for monitoring particular keywords found on Twitter. Other stats like mentions, retweets and following are also available.

Set up on a free trial was painless with minimum effort and adding social media profiles was generally a 2-3 click process to add Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Feedly. It also incorporates google analytics and operates using a classic dashboard. Posting to different social profiles was just a matter of adding the content and clicking the profiles with the optional inbuilt scheduler allowing flexibility on when it would appear. The dashboard in general was intuitive with rapid report generation and useful exploring and search tools. (EY) No option to upload video or multiple images to Twitter via the Scheduling App. Reporting option is great, with the option to sort Facebook posts per engagement particularly useful. Overall, it has many of the features needed under one dashboard (scheduling, reports, assign tasks, Twitter Advanced Search), which makes it extremely useful.

Is There Anything I Should Know?

Nothing compelling to upgrade. Auto shortens links to buff.ly, but you can override. Time zone of scheduler is confusing. If you've already scheduled a post to publish, you cannot change the distribution e.g. just add in G+ after scheduled - instead set up new post 🙁

Hootsuite has a cool bookmarker called Hootlet that allows you to schedule content directly from your web browser. Hootsuite also supports RSS feeds so you can ensure you latest blog is automatically distributed to Social Media as soon as it’s published. It also offers suggested content - which is similar in nature to the content you share and allows you add it to your publishing schedule (hit and miss at present). Hootsuite integrates with Google Analytics, Twitter and Facebook Insights and can create Social Media reports in seconds. Pro account holders are allowed create a number of reports for free, otherwise they come at an additional cost. Hootsuite allows you to add 100s of apps to your dashboard. E.g. Pocket and Feedly from Hootsuite and even manage YouTube Account. Finally - the only issue with Hootsuite at present is that it does not (currently) display visuals properly when posting from to Twitter, it posts as a link. And if you're posting a link, it posts 2 links if it's got an image in it.

45 mins to integrate a FB account. Not a good UI. Can schedule. Can bulk upload. Can integrate a bit.ly account and create a unique URL shortener. Very basic posting functions. Can create a Reservoir - can create a schedule to post at different times. Monitoring is basic - just mentions, and RT's. CLUNKY. Needs training. UGLY. Basic version can only add Twitter. 7 day trial you can add other accounts, big learning curve to learn it in 1 week. Support was quick enough, help section is descriptive - good - but it's a big time investment.

Follow up mails including offers of phone support from a dedicated person gave a nice personal touch to the experience. Sprout Social really comes into its own when you are managing teams with a powerful task manager and is very suited to larger organisations with disparate teams and multiple profiles. Its mobile version works well with similar functionality. One of the draw backs is the relatively low number of social profiles it connects to and would expect instagram etc.

Who would you recommend it for?

"An organisation (doesn't matter the size) who is already running its own publishing schedule, who wants to supplement with shared content. Yes,
it's probably not as sophisticated as some, but definitely a great scheduling tool, and a lot of functionality comes for free."

My favourite of all the platforms, but currently has a few issues with posting images (in particular to Twitter). Would recommend a PRO account that allows you to manage up to 100 accounts. I would use it to post to multiple LinkedIn and Facebook Groups.

We wouldn't!

A large organisation with multiple profiles and team members

Cost inc VAT

$10 per month Awesome (up to 100 posts and tweets + 10 social profiles per month) Freemium model. Free package is pretty good to get started. "Awesome package” has some analytics with export functionality, you can have more multiple admins on an account, and allows you to schedule more posts in advance. Awesome plan is $102 per year, Small Business Plan is $50/mth which is pricey. Discount for non-profits is nice touch.

Free account for up to 5 Social Networks. Hootsuite Pro (recommended) $9.99 per month (free 30 day trial available) - allows you to collaborate with up to 10 team members, manage 100 accounts and access free Social Media reports. There is a further paid option - Hootsuite Enterprise for larger organisiations.

One to watch: echobox – This new scheduling app might suit large publishers,
enabling them to curate ALL the content on their site to send to social. It forecasts ideal post times and layouts, AB testing each post. The range of features includes forecasting Page Views (which is the publisher’s bread and butter) and the algorithm learns what works and what doesn’t. One key aspect is you can flick a switch, and ultimately let it publish for you. Someone may be out of a job soon.

All opinions are based on the personal views and experiences of the individual ‘toolers’ as business professionals and digital marketers.Each tool is reviewed by 2+ individuals to ensure objectivity. Opinions expressed by IIA Toolshed are not the opinions of any organisation, or group of organisations, who participate. Time is given freely by all members for this initiative.

This is a guest post by Robert Purcell. Robert is a member of the IIA Social Media Working Group which seeks to support businesses in the development of strategies for engaging with social media. As Marketing Manager for Post Consult International Ltd. (PCI), Robert’s main focus is developing the marketing and product strategy for the company’s Security Solutions offered under the corporate brand, Post.Trust. Post.Trust is a national-level Certificate Authority, wholly owned by An Post, providing security solutions that enable organisations to communicate with one another more securely and confidently in a trusted environment. You can find him on LinkedIn or @robgerard on Twitter.

Engage! Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

Brian Solis (Author), Ashton Kutcher (Foreword)

The second edition of Engage! written by social media thought leader Brian Solis really is a fascinating read. I haven’t read the first edition, but this instalment focuses more on enabling you to design a new media engagement program specific to your business and your customers. It empowers you to develop metrics and KPIs to measure the success of your activities and translate that data into bottom-line benefits. As anyone who has ever tried to champion a social media program within their organisation knows; the first question you are asked is, What’s the ROI of social media? This book will help you answer that question.

A word of warning though – Engage! is not a book you can pick up and read from cover to cover. Sections of the book are quite dense and academic – but then isn’t that what you would expect a Complete Guide to be? The book doesn’t define its target audience but whether you are new to social media or experienced in social media marketing, this book has plenty of substance and will serve as a source of reference in your social media activities. As Solis says, this is an opportunity to “hit ctrl-alt-del and restart with a fresh perspective”.

The book starts by defining social media and introducing the arsenal of social media tools available for creating touchpoints across the Social Web. It explores building a framework to amplify the visibility of your social objects, extending the reach of your online presence to new audiences, and defining the end game, ultimately guiding people to action through participating, listening and engagement.

Solis reminds us that understanding the rules of engagement is critical in this new world of socialised media. It’s about training and putting the necessary policies and guidelines in place to ensure everyone is singing from the same hymn book. The latter part of the book looks at the realignment and restructuring the organisation as part of this socialisation process. Finally, it focuses on the management of this social media activity; how to track, measure and translate that social data into tangible value for the business.

Solis discusses the concept of unmarketing as one of the most effective forms of marketing in this new genre of socialised media and really unmarketing underpins the ‘How’ organisations should use Social Media. Marketing is no longer about broadcasting brand messages – it’s about embodying the characteristics of your brand, being an active participant in the conversation, contributing value to earn relevance, build influence and create brand advocacy and loyalty toward a desired outcome.

At times, reading the book was a bit of a slog and I found myself going back over passages each time I picked it up because there was a lot to absorb. But on the whole, I found it uplifting and insightful, reaffirming my understanding of the real power of Social Media – so stick with it. Solis’s voice comes through the words on the page, inspiring the reader to embrace the social web, to champion new media engagement and become the expert to drive change within the organisation. The book is ‘peppered’ with frameworks, methodologies and tools to assist you in your journey towards building a two-way information bridge between the organisation and the online communities in those networks you choose to participate.

As Solis says, “The future of business is social”. Social Media cannot be confined to one person or department. The entire business must socialise. Organisations must embrace and ride the social wave or risk being engulfed by it.

“The greatest advantages of social media reside in its ability for worthy individuals and companies to shape perception, steer activity, incite action, and adapt to the communities that establish the market. Engage or die.”

Brian Solis is regarded as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. Engage! is available on iTunes, Kindle, online bookstores and a book store near you.

Okay no prizes for original titles for me when writing about Google’s new service Buzz. I’m now seeing it in my Gmail from my PC but so far I have checked it out more often on the iPhone. I fear Google may be a little late to the party on this one but the promised open-ness (“Connect sites you already use. Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader.”) should allow people already familiar with other Google services to tap into it. I already use Friendfeed in a very lacklustre manner admittedly but it fills my lifestreaming void (Bet you didn’t even know you could have one of them eh?) Increasingly many social networks do allow this cross pollination through RSS feeds and APIs. The amount of replication as a result can be overwhelming and irritating. I know one of the things I’ll be doing next week while waiting for the arrival of Nipper 3.0 will be sorting out all my feeds, where they’re going and who’s seeing them. I know, the excitement!

However not everyone is enthralled by Buzz. Laurent Francois of Social Media Today feels that the assumption that Google make that you automatically want to be visible or see all your Gmail contacts is a big assumption and a questionable attitude to privacy.

But what’s the buzz for business? The mobile version is location specific (although it’s been having a fine time pinpointing my location so far) allowing users to “view buzz near your location” or “Post buzz tagged with your location”. This could be a great boon to businesses using Buzz and Google Maps as one of the functions allows the user to see Buzz “Nearby” and add in locations not unlike that other new-ish kid on the Irish block, Foursquare. Businesses could buzz about special offers, events, opening hours etc. and pick up passing buzzers. Despite Laurent’s fears above it will still be up to customers whether they follow the buzz on businesses or not. For customers however it’s nice to know that you can click on the nearby button when you’re thinking of a purchase and seeing if any nearby businesses are offering any specials, whether they are open and what your options are.

Calling all business bloggers! If you blog for your business, no matter what size, we want to hear more about your experience. We would like to gauge the effectiveness of blogging for business, start collecting data about trends, the costs involved, your target audiences and the benefits. We look forward to sharing the anonymised results of this survey and analysis of the data with you in due course.

The survey results are well worth a read and with my nerdy social research background I am very happy to read on Simon’s blog that Deloitte plan to run the survey again next year. Nothing like the promise of some longitudinal data to get the heart racing of a cold Tuesday morning!

IIA Member Company SimplyZesty recently ran another successful measurement camp. The session itself was attended by less than normal but ran to a familiar structure with two presenters followed by a group activity based on three case study scenarios.

Overall although online is much more measurable than traditional media the demands to quantify it financially have not been met to date. The first wave of measurement has been around physical numbers i.e. numbers of followers, number of posts. These give a topline indication of engagement but translating this into actual worth is tricky. How much is a follower/friend actually worth? Sure it’s great to get some “thumbs up” and “love” but what are these actual measures worth? For property owners such as bebo this poses real challenges. Engagement models are generally built around the pushing and advertising of the page profile but savvy brand holders want more. The burden of responsibility is getting pushed back to the property owners as marketers want more metrics to gauge success while platform owners need agreement on values attached to elements so that they can build charging models. Currently the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) advertising model is the main charging structure used. If the platform owner is charged with the financial delivery then they need to have full control over the creative, which again would pose problems.

Philip McCarthy now ex Bebo gave a good overview of some campaigns that they have run and admitted that measurement is still at an early stage. Bebo does engagement very well but an experience with Coca Cola Burn posed interesting questions about what he should have charged. Current values are around 3 euro cost per thousand which would indicate a value of €60k for the Coke campaign that achieved 20m impressions. The campaign achieved 17,000 visits to the site, 126 comments, 7 photos, 70 quizzes, 679 skins used.

Engagement is something that social media does really well and according to Philip there must be a value to it.

Philip debated using traditional rates that are charged for advertorials, something that is pretty much set and understood with traditional media. Basing digital charging models on established off line models has merit in that brand owners understand them but is probably not the best starting point.

The establishment of a base line measurement was discussed that could be used across other media but no one has yet taken this step to any great degree.

Where this gets particularly difficult is in getting values on things like thumbs up, love and other signs of engagement used on different social networks. It’s great to get them but what do they really mean and what value could be put on them?

One of the areas discussed that could help on measurement in the real world was the use of redeemable bar codes. The idea being that rather than a virtual present that people could send a ‘printable’ bar code or even one that could be displayed on a phone. This could be taken to an outlet and redeemed. This could help track social media activity to actual sales. For example a coffee shop could build an app that allows users to send a coffee to friends. The friend could print out or show the barcode that would be scanned through at an actual coffee shop. By doing this the coffee shop could measure the actual sales generated by the voucher and social media activity. Some good work in being done in this area by IIA Member Company Zappa but problems still exist for terminals to read bar codes on screen.

The overall feeling from the event was that some leadership needs to be established in measuring the value of online campaigns and that the current metrics, while good, are not financially based enough for brand owners. The UK Measurement Camp has also suffered from similar problems.

My own observation is that once criteria that are reasonably sound are established Klout, TweetLevel for Twitter, or Technorati for blogs could start to become industry standards. At some point someone needs to take a brave step. The online community will undoubtable respond and some progress could be made.

A new addition to this list could of course be a Facebook vanity URL. A vanity URL is best explained as follows: www.facebook.com/yournameorcompanynamehere. These went live on Saturday and there was a land grab with no small amount of controversy in Ireland anyway. I managed to get my second choice for my personal Facebook page although my name does not seem to be associated with anyone else. I don’t care too much about my own personal brand but I do care about the IIA. The IIA are a real latecomer to the Facebook party and recent changes to how a company can represent themselves and use Facebook have tempted us to get involved. (Oh yes and of course a small matter of a keynote speaker but we didn’t want to seem TOO reactionary!) We also haven’t promoted our Facebook page much yet.

Photo right owned by jasonlam (cc) However I was a little ticked off that we couldn’t secure a vanity url for our Facebook page because we don’t have a 1000 fans! A quick gander at some of our members who have Facebook pages for a LOT longer allows me to feel that my irritation is justified. The Institute of Designers in Ireland, a member organisation too, has a very healthy 260 members at time of writing. Blacknight have 189 fans, the Flowers Made Easy Group has 184 members: I could go on. My point being that not many of these Irish companies groups or pages have 500 fans or members never mind 1000! (Okay so Barry’s Tea have over 3,000 but who doesn’t love a nice cuppa?) How are we going to ensure that we get our vanity URLs, people? The IIA is up against the Iraqi Interim Authority and the Indian Internet Alliance here and some others besides!

So in the vain hope that the powers that be in Facebook might read my humble wee blog post please reconsider and drop the required number of fans to a more realistic 250 fans, even just for Irish online businesses. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all those social ads…?

This week’s case study has been written by Gordon Jenkinson of Jenerate.

Bacardi Ireland distributor, Edward Dillon & Co, traditionally used normal micro sites such as www.blive.ie to promote their sponsorship of music events on the Internet throughout the year including the hugely popular Oxegen and Electric Picnic festivals.

In 2008 they looked at the possibility of using social networking to get better targeting and some viral penetration to a wider audience. Given the target audience and the fact that Bebo and MySpace were not receptive to alcohol advertising, Facebook was chosen as the platform upon which to build an interest in the brand, to run competitions in association with the Blive events and generally to help spread the word on the Bacardi Blive sponsored events throughout the year.

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A Facebook profile page was set up and maintained as well as a Facebook application to manage competitions and acquire information for the Bacardi eCRM database. The general idea of the competition was a chance to win VIP tickets for you and your friends through a custom built Facebook application.

To encourage the viral spread of this through Facebook in the run up to the events the winner was the Facebook user that had the most friends with the application added to their profile. This gave users control over winning the competition rather than it being a pure lottery.

User positions were updated hourly and notifications sent to entrants on a regular basis telling them how many more friends they needed to add to get to first place. This information had the desired effect and entrants realising they only needed 10 more friends to get to the winning position started sending it around to increase there position. As well as this, they could see the top 5 people and also there current position at any time throughout the competition.

Banner advertising on popular Irish sites and flyers handed out throughout the year were used to seed the initial entrants and get the competition going. Other spot prizes for fans of the page and users of the application were given out between the events to encourage participation and interaction with the Bacardi Ireland Facebook presence.

As part of the competition sign-up, entrants were asked some brand questions to gauge brand recognition and opinions. Details were collected and stored in the Bacardi eCRM database and used for future campaigns and event notifications.

The final result was an almost four fold increase in the number of competition entrants and an even bigger increase in term of brand interaction across the Bacardi Facebook profiles and the blive.ie website.

A large aid to this interaction was the use of Facebook photo galleries where people were photographed at Blive events and encouraged to tag themselves in the Facebook albums. These photos were not only available on Facebook but also pulled directly from Facebook into the blive.ie website. These photo galleries created significant post event traffic to the Blive.ie websites as well as interaction and sign-up to the Bacardi Facebook pages.

One of the main lessons learnt from this successful experiment with Facebook was to create an application that runs with or without Facebook. As part of the process visitors were asked if they had a Facebook account and were directed to the normal competition site or to the Facebook one. Almost as many entrants came through the normal site as through the Facebook application.

Also, the integration of the Facebook photo albums using the Facebook API allowed the viewing of tagged photos within Facebook or from the normal site. It’s also useful to copy or mirror interactions with Facebook pages onto your normal site this allows visitors to what would normally be a static site to see some comments, events and other banter focused around the brand.

With the introduction of Facebook Connect late last year the options for this type of website integration to Facebook is even greater, allowing completely Facebook-integrated websites.

The other more complex aspect is ensuring that the promotion of the Facebook pages and application are sufficient to seed it and the rewards for sign-up are clear and worthwhile.

Monitoring of visitors and the decisions they make is very important. This was monitored using analytics during the campaign and the sign-up pages and the navigation from the initial page through to competition sign-up were optimised for more competition entries.

The IIA supports responsible drinking and encourages readers of this post to visit www.drinkaware.ie.